"God, poor little girl using her own naive imagination to keep her alive."

The skies were crying blue, rain mocking her hidden sobs from those who caused it. Outside, the world revolves, unaware, careless, and unbothered. But inside her, a storm raged. It didn't scream, anger didn't tear loose rather a silent one — it breaks her slowly.

She taught herself to be quiet. Not because she had nothing to say but simply because she believed that no one was there to listen.

She was a daughter. Just a daughter. Her hands yearned for comfort, only finding a cold whip of air for her to grab. Her mother was strong yet distant, leaving her role to others to fill the missing half. The father that she didn't know, a question mark in her life, a space left blank and unnamed in forms. And so, from the first day she stepped into reality, she had to be her anchor in a world that kept drifting.

And the little girl — she learned to understand. Too early. Too much.

She remembered her first heartbreak, it haunts, still throbbing in pain… not the romantic kind but the kind that comes with nights of loneliness leaving her to cling on to a blanket. She would cry herself to sleep, the pillow catching her tears that no one else saw. Shadows that enveloped her cocoon, no arms to run into after a bad dream, no warm hand to pat her back when she trips in life. She wiped her tears. She became her comfort.

At school, she excelled. Her surroundings called her "mature," "magaling," "matalino." They didn't see her crack, the spilling mess that came before the strength. They didn't know that she sat in front of her reflection for hours practicing her smile.

She uses her imagination, reminiscing about her mother's voice on the other end of a static call, the scent of her perfume left behind in her clothes. The letters were scribbled on old papers. She replays it all in her mind like a broken record, like a tiny light bulb, barely holding on, flickering inside her soul.

She never blamed her mother. Never once. She understood what had to be done. That sometimes, the greatest sacrifices are the ones no one applauds.

"Ang hirap mama." She saw her mother crying to her grandmother. How the little girl felt jealous, even her own mother had someone to cradle her. But who was she to complain? She knew her mother's hands were sore from labor, her eyes weary from longing. And so she stitched her lips with unspoken truths of her emotions.

There she was sitting in the dark sometimes, gathering herself piece by piece, talking to God, to the ceiling, to the universe… Why? Why did she have to carry so much at a young age? Why did she have to play parents to herself? Why did the world forgot little girls who tried to be okay?

She wished, more than anything, for someone to hold her. Not to fix her. Not to lecture her. Just to hold her. But no one came.

She wiped her own tears. She cleaned up her own messes. She mended her broken heart back together with trembling hands, over and over again.

Because daughters like her. Daughters who raise themselves. They don't know how to give up. They find strength in the tiniest pieces: a dream, the sound of her friends laughing, the hope that maybe, one day, someone will stay.

What if no one else does?

Then she'll still rise.

Because she's the daughter who wiped her own tears.

The daughter who grew up in silence.

The daughter who kept going, even when the world gave her every reason not to.

And that kind of strength? That kind of love?

It's heartbreaking.

It's beautiful.

It shouldn't be, but it is…

And it's real.

My pretty little baby girl, let me wipe your tears, let me listen to your aching heart, let me be your solace for I once been there… and it pains me to imagine you going through this alone. I'll be here, haayan mo sila at hindi natin sila bati. :)